UnitedHealthcare makes an announcement that means Obamacare unravels even more.

One of the nation’s largest insurers said Tuesday that it will drastically cut its involvement in Obamacare’s exchanges next year, while analysts expect other insurers to hike their rates to cover mounting losses from taking part in the health care law.

UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen J. Hemsley said a sicker-than-expected customer base pushed them to lose $1 billion in 2015 and 2016, and they will cut their participation from 34 states this year to just a “handful” next year.

“The smaller overall market size and shorter-term, higher-risk profile within this market segment continue to suggest we cannot broadly serve it on an effective and sustained basis,” Mr. Hemsley said during a first-quarter earnings call. “Next year, we will remain in only a handful of states, and we will not carry financial exposure from exchanges into 2017.”

I used to think that Obamacare was a corrupt gift to insurers. Indeed, insurance giants like Cigna, are staying in the Obamacare exchanges hoping that they will eventually make a profit. But it seems the government is not competent to set up favored corporations. At least, UnitedHealth’s decision makers have lost faith that the government will ever get the system they have created to work.

Obamacare keeps moving from disaster to disaster, leaving taxpayers holding the bag. Yet, to many Americans, this does not mean that the government was wrong to take responsibility for providing healthcare. Instead, it just means that Obama didn’t go far enough. As mentioned in the video clip, Bernie Sanders is treating the failure of Obamacare as a reason to trust the government to provide healthcare directly.

Instead, we need to entirely privatize healthcare. Only that can bring down costs so that the most people will gain access.

Joe Scudder is the "nom de plume" (or "nom de guerre") of a fifty-ish-year-old writer and stroke survivor. He lives in St Louis with his wife and still-at-home children. He has been a freelance writer and occasional political activist since the early nineties. He describes his politics as Tolkienesque.